A-Maze!-ING Review

Well, I saw the description for this game and I thought “Cool, I love maze games”. Unfortunately, this is not one of them.

The premise of the game is that you are stuck in a volcano and must navigate the maze in order to find a way out. The unfortunate part of the game is that you have a time limit in order to do this. Although the time seems substantial, it does seem to go down quite quickly. This fact gives you the impression that you must hurry and rush through the maze as quickly as possible.

The graphics aren’t bad overall. They are pretty decent compared to some games that I have played in the past. You’re shown as this little punk rocker type dude that must navigate the maze. On the way you have to try and avoid rocks and what appear to be little green globs of slime and email icons. Not sure how those symbols worked into the developers mind for this.

The music for the game gets annoying really fast. If you have a volume control for your surround sound, you may want to have it handy or just pop on some nice music of your own if you are going to play it.

One of the major problems that I have with this game is how fast it gets old. You control your guy with the left joystick only. There are no weapons or tools to be had. As you try to navigate the maze, you encounter groups of things that must be avoided. If you are touched by any one of them, you die and have to restart right back at point A. The groups of rocks, slime and icons that come at you move faster than you can so there is no use trying to outrun it. The other problem is that the groups come at you on a diagonal axis. This means that if you get stuck in the middle of them and want to back up a bit, you have to try and go on an angle. This is very difficult if you get stuck in one of the many thin hallways that you have to navigate.

On the instruction page, it says that this game is version 1.0. I hope that this means that they will look into offering different skill levels and changing the music if they decide to make a different version of it. Personally, I feel that this is better suited to a trial only game.